Rockstar and Timbaland have joined forces to transform your PSP into a world-class mixer, enabling you to weave together music tracks with ease. Beaterator started out in 2005 as a flash application on Rockstar's website, but this full-featured edition coming to the PSP expands on that basic concept of an eight-track music maker. Bear in mind that this isn't a game -- it's a music creation suite.
Music games are all the rage these days, with lots of plastic instruments to choose from for your Guitar Heroing, Rock Banding and Sing Starring pleasure. The difference between Beaterator and these rhythm / music games is that here you're creating music, not imitating it. There's no hackneyed storyline here about an up-and-coming music producer trying to fight his way off of the mean streets, defying all odds in his bid to make it to the big time. Think of Beaterator more like a music-making tool that you can access on the go, allowing you to craft music from a library that encompasses thousands of different sounds and loops, including 1300 or so that Timbaland made specifically for Beaterator. While I wasn't able to go through the entire audio catalog during my brief demo, I did get to check out some synthy laser sounds, which made my day.
Produce on the Cheap
Rockstar wants you to come away with two main impressions of Beaterator. The first is that this is a legitimate music maker, on par with professional-quality software but without the hefty price tag. For $40 you get something portable yet still quite capable of putting together great-sounding tracks. You can use the mic built into the PSP-3000 series (or a mic add-on) to record singing, raps, beatboxing, anything you like, really, and combine that with the drums, synths, flutes, and other sounds to create what you please. Anything you make in Beaterator can be exported as a WAV file, uploaded to the Rockstar Social Club, and so on. You own your created music, so it's yours to do with as you please.
The second point that was driven home during my demo of Beaterator was that the software is meant to be accessible to anyone, not just professional musicians. This accessibility was exemplified by one of Beaterator's main modes: Live Play.
With Live Play you can jump in quickly to craft loops as part of a collaboration between your creativity and Timbaland's sound bank, along with a nudge in the right direction from Rockstar's software, which conveniently keeps everything on beat without any fuss. The interface here couldn't get much simpler. You start off by picking a template, say Hip Hop Template 2, and then proceed to add the sounds that would fit into that basic song structure. The face buttons are mapped to instruments and sounds, like bass, drums, backing, keys, and so on. Tap a few buttons, listen to what you get, and make a few edits until you get something you like. You could have an original song going in a matter of minutes.
PSP Killed the Studio Star?
Studio Session is where you'll take the track that you slapped together in Live Play and refine it, insert custom vocals, and really add some production value. It's essentially the same tool as Live Play, but with far more control over the tracks. You have all the fiddly knobs you'd expect to easily adjust volume, alter BPM, isolate individual tracks, increase the sound coming from the speakers, and so on. For example, you could have really loud, thumping bass offset by a more subdued synth track. I'm hoping for plenty of cowbell.
While you can get started easily using the pre-recorded sounds that Timbaland and Rockstar provided, you'll eventually want to use the Song Crafter to make your own stuff from scratch. This is where you'll experiment with setting drum triggers and write your own songs with the help of the Melody Crafter's 88-key keyboard. Sorry, piano lessons not included.
There's a lot of music-making power at your fingertips here, and I came away from my demo thinking that the only thing that'll limit prospective musicians will be the PSP hardware. While you can record your own voice clips and such, if the files are too large you'll probably overwhelm the PSP's limited memory. I was impressed by the load times (or lack thereof) during my demo, but I didn't get a chance to see how importing recorded audio was handled, so that's still up in the air.
Beaterator is out to break down the barrier to entry for those who've wanted to craft their own beats or become music producers. The PSP and PlayStation Network versions will be available on September 29th, with an iPhone and iPod Touch version coming this fall. Just be sure to stay away from the auto-tuner, okay?
